The
Dale Cramer File:
Summer of Light by W. Dale Cramer
"You never know what the day will bring..."
Mick Brannigan, a construction worker, loses a good-paying job because of some freak accident, sort of his fault but not his fault. Adding insult to injury, he finds himself playing nursemaid to his three kids.
"Mick's whole life felt like an accident..."
Even more flustered is his wife, Layne, now forced to get a job to keep a paycheck coming in. Mick isn't the stay-at-home-dad type, she's sure. He's a good dad--when she is there to supervise it all…the unrelenting daily stuff. Keeping the house clean, food in the fridge. Attacking the ever-mounting laundry. Supervising their five acres of land and the menagerie of animals....
"It wasn't his idea to stay home with the kids..."
A lot is on the line, and just how the Brannigan family will survive--that
is, without anyone getting seriously hurt or killed, the kids not ending
up psychologically and emotionally damaged, the laundry not undoing their
marriage--all remains to be seen....
CHAPTER ONE
The Trouble With Dylan
Mick Brannigan's daddy only gave him one piece of advice when he was growing
up, but he gave it to him on a number of occasions.
He said, "Son, you need to sit down and shut up."
Mick's father was quiet most of the time—in the same way that a rattlesnake is quiet most of the time—but the genetic pendulum swung the other way a generation later, and Mick didn't inherit his father's taciturn nature. Constantly surprised and delighted by the things he heard himself say, he was often baffled by other people's failure to see the humor in it. The great turning points in Mick's life almost always hinged on things he wished he hadn't said, and yet it still came as a surprise to him when something he said got him dragged off the top of a twelve-story building and cost him his job.
It certainly wasn't his idea to stay home with the kids. Layne's church friends, the homeschool crowd, were always pontificating on how the parenting of children was the highest calling and the noblest sacrifice. Mick didn't buy it for a minute. Those people seemed to live in a world that was very different from the one he lived and worked in every day, though he did manage, at least, to keep his father's advice and hold his tongue whenever Layne's church friends pontificated. But he never wanted to be a stay-at-home dad. He loved his job, and he'd sooner have sawed off his left arm than give up being an ironworker to stay home with three kids. In the end he didn't have a choice. He was forced into it by what seemed like a bizarre string of accidents, though after the dust settled even Mick understood that a string of accidents can only go on so long and can only be so bizarre before reason rules out chance. At some point, the sheer weight of the odds begins to argue for design.
It started innocently enough. The daycare center called Layne at work and asked her to stop by. Layne always dropped off Dylan in the morning and Mick picked him up in the afternoon, but whenever there was a problem the daycare people didn't mention it to Mick, no doubt because he showed up every day with rust stains on his hands and battle-scarred work boots on his feet, ragged jeans, hair mashed down in a sweaty ring by a long day under a hard hat. Mick never had much to say to them. He could understand why the ladies at A Small World daycare would rather talk to the polite, smiling, nicely dressed mother who dropped Dylan off every morning than the nasty ironworker who picked him up in the afternoon.
The first few times Layne sat facing him in the living room with a yellow note in her hand and that look of deep concern on her face, Mick told her flatly that she and Dylan's teachers were overreacting, that Dylan was perfectly normal. Lots of kids preferred to play alone. Lots of kids refused to eat lunch. Lots of kids, particularly four-year-olds, fell on their faces whenever they tried to jump rope.
But then came the weird stuff.
A normal kid might gripe about his shirt irritating him, but he wouldn't strip down to his tightie-whities in public and leave a trail of clothes all over the playground.
"Itchy," Dylan explained. He had a normal vocabulary for his age but never used more words than necessary because he had trouble getting them right. He lisped a little, and his Gs came out like Ds. He was a gifted mimic and could imitate virtually any kind of noise with uncanny accuracy, yet he couldn't make words come out right.
For the most part Mick managed to calm Layne's fears until the evening she blocked his view of Monday Night Football and read him the latest note from Dylan's teacher.
"He does what?" He picked up the remote and muted the game.
"He licks her ankle." One of her eyebrows went up—a bad sign—and she sat there straightening out the crumpled note against her knee, staring at it. "He does it a lot lately, and she finds it ... disconcerting."
"Which one?"
"Which ankle? What possible difference—"
"I meant which teacher," Mick said.
"Oh. Mrs. Fensdemacher. Why?"
He shuddered. "Well, if it was Miss Gabriel I could sort of understand it, but Mrs. Fensdemacher ... ugh."
"He's four, Mick. Grow up."
Two days later she took a day off and carried Dylan to the pediatrician, who asked a few questions and referred him to a child psychologist, who asked more questions and referred him to an occupational therapist, who asked still more questions and then put Dylan through a whole battery of tests. She put lead weights on his arms and legs to see how it made him feel, then laid him in the floor and put a weighted blanket on top of him. She had him dancing, hopping, marching, and literally jumping through hoops. None of the doctors was ready to commit to a diagnosis, though they all felt there was reason for concern. They scheduled more appointments.
But the day Dylan put Ryan Carden up against the wall and it took three grown women to keep him from strangling the larger boy, the call from A Small World was approaching hysteria. It would be their last warning.
"Boy needs discipline," Mick said. It was after supper. He was drying a plate while Layne washed. Dylan was in the tub and the other two were off doing homework. "You and those old ladies at the daycare center are too soft, that's all. My old man would've killed me ... if he'd been there."
Layne let that one slide. She knew Mick didn't want to be like his father.
"Seriously, Mick, what are we going to do? The daycare people are trying to be sympathetic, but they see him as a threat now. The very next incident—no matter how minor—he'll get expelled, and then what do we do?"
"Find another daycare." He said this absently, sliding a plate into the cabinet.
"And then what? Wait for it to happen again? Mick, there's a problem here that we can't ignore. We have another appointment with the therapist tomorrow."
"Right. Doctors have to make their BMW payments."
"You're not listening," she said, and the fist holding the wet rag splashed down into the dishwater. He'd pushed her a little too far. "I've researched this pretty thoroughly, if you're interested, and what the doctors aren't saying yet is three words—sensory integration dysfunction. They don't want to put it on his record because once it's there it stays there, but that's what they're thinking. It's a serious problem, Mick."
"So you think just because he nutted up on Ryan Carden, Dylan's got this sensory whattayacallit disease? Listen, if that Carden kid is anything like his dad, I can understand it. I've thought about throttling his old man a time or two my ownself." He poked the towel down into a glass.
"It's not a disease, Mick, it's a developmental disorder. It's just that Dylan's brain doesn't get the messages from his senses exactly right. It's like his volume knobs are out of whack—some are turned way down low and some are up too high. He licked Mrs. Fensdemacher's ankle because he likes the texture of pantyhose on his tongue, that's all. But this stuff has got him so disoriented he just doesn't understand that he can't go around licking people's ankles. Then one day, when he feels like his feet won't touch the ground and everybody around him is speaking Chinese, he gets frustrated and takes it out on Ryan."
Mick blinked, lowered the towel. This was serious. "So. Is it permanent? I mean, is he like stuck with this thing for life?"
She shook her head, dropped a handful of silverware in the rack. "No. There are all kinds of different ways it can affect a kid, and all sorts of other stuff it can be mixed up with, like autism or ADD, but no. Sensory integration dysfunction by itself is usually just a matter of time and therapy." She went on at some length, describing Dylan's problem with a bag of words he'd never heard before—words like proprioception and dyspraxia. He knew she wasn't trying to show him up; it was just her way of making him see that she knew exactly what she was talking about. Layne was a paralegal. She did research for a living.
"If we work with him," she said, finally, "we can help him catch up with his senses, maybe in six months or a year. If we don't do something now it could affect him into his twenties—all the way through school."
But she stopped too abruptly and left her words hanging. There was something else—he could see it in her face.
"What?" he finally asked.
She bit her lip and squinted. "It's just that it's going to take a lot of work. One on one. He needs to be at home, in a safe, uncomplicated social setting for a while. And he's going to need therapy. He'll have to see a therapist once a week and he'll have to have special exercises at home every day."
"Sounds expensive," he said.
"Well, I think insurance will cover most of it, but that's not the point."
There was a sadness in her eyes, and he suddenly realized there was no way she could deal with Dylan's problems while working a full-time job. Layne had put her career on hold for five years while she was having babies, and when she finally got ready to go to work it took her six months to land a job with the right law firm. She loved her work, and she made good money. Most of all she felt incredibly lucky to have landed where she did. She felt it was a once-in-a-lifetime break, and she would never get it again. All at once it hit him just how cruel it would be for her to have to give up her job now, just when things were going so well. She needed his support.
"I see," he said. When she placed a bowl upside down in the rack he laid his hand on top of hers. "You want to know if it's okay for you to quit your job."
"Nnnnno," she said, with a sideways chuckle that scared him a little. "I want to know if it's okay for you to quit yours."
He froze for a second, staring at her, his eyes slightly wider.
"Um, my job? Quit my job? Mine?"
A nod.
"Ah, no. Never gonna happen." He picked up three plates at once and shoved them into the cabinet with a decisive clatter. Case closed.
She smiled, too sweetly. "But Mick, dearest"—dearest was her patience word—"someone has to do it. You can see that, can't you? It's the only way."
"All right, then do it. Knock yourself out. I can pay the bills while you're not working. I've done it before."
For a while she said nothing, standing there looking at him with a little smile that made his palms sweat.
"Layne," Mick said, and he heard the faint cry in his own voice, "you know why. I have to bring home a paycheck. I can't not make a living."
She knew. Over the years he'd told her plenty of times how his father had left them high and dry, and what they had to do to make ends meet. He wouldn't—couldn't—put himself in that position. Layne didn't say anything for a while, just stood there scrubbing a pot with a Brillo pad. She seemed so calm. Finally she took a deep breath and drove a spike through the dialog.
"Well," she said, "I'll pray about it. We'll see."
That was the worst. Layne had an irritating way of trumping an argument by saying she'd pray about it. He knew better than to bring it up in front of her church friends but it always seemed kind of bogus to him. As if the God of the universe would pick out a man's tie for him. Layne prayed about everything, which was fine if it made her feel better, but when she ran it out there as a closing argument it almost felt like she was using religion as a lever to get what she wanted. Appealing to a higher court.
"Yeah," he muttered. "We'll see."
Excerpted from:
Summer of Light by W. Dale Cramer
Copyright © 2007; ISBN 0764229966
Published by Bethany House Publishers
Used by permission. Unauthorized duplication prohibited.
